Saturday, September 27, 2014

standard model - What type of neutrinos do we detect


There are three types of neutrinos known today. When detecting them, how can we tell which type we are detecting?


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Answer



Neutrino flavor is defined as agreeing with the flavor of the charged lepton participating in the interaction, so that the neutrino in the reaction $$ \nu + A \to \mu + X \,, $$ is defined to be a muon neutrino and the one in $$ \nu + n \to e + p $$ is a electron neutrino by definition.


We have no way of knowing the alleged flavor of a neutrino participating in a neutral current interaction.




As a matter of experimental fact electron and moun neutrinos (and anti-neutrinos) are easy, but tau neutrinos are much harder because demonstrating that you have a tau-lepton is hard, but both OPERA and IceCube can do that (to chose currently running experiments).


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